The budget woes of school districts, cities and counties are about to get more woeful, and you can lay the blame right at the feet of the governor and state lawmakers.

The budget woes of school districts, cities and counties are about to get more woeful, and you can lay the blame right at the feet of the governor and state lawmakers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state controller and the state treasurer said they are delaying $2.9billion in payments to schools and local government next month. That's a month earlier than anyone expected and is a direct result of failure in Sacramento.

Failure under the Capitol dome is nothing new, of course, especially when it's the state budget. So routine is that failure that it would only really be news if they got the work done on time.

Lawmakers and the governor have been plugging state budget deficits for years now, and this year is no different. A $19 billion deficit looms, and the state is running out of cash to pay day-to-day bills. Like last year, the use of state IOUs looms.

But because so much money on which schools and local government depend is laundered through Sacramento, when things go bad up there, they quickly get really bad down here - you know, where people actually care if teachers are in the classroom, police are on patrol and potholes get filled.

There are statutory requirements for schools and local government to complete their budgets on time. They make those deadlines even though they often have only the vaguest notion of their state income, because in the parallel universe of Sacramento, warp speed - or even all deliberate speed - is an unknown concept.

We've known all along that government finance is a mess. Furloughs, hiring freezes, employee concessions and service reductions are a pretty good indication times are tough. But Sacramento has an obligation not to make things worse. One way is to get the budget done on time, so we at least can operate from real numbers.

We understand that's hard. We understand an election year makes it even harder. But that doesn't make it impossible.